No more underestimating this pioneer of design
Miss Saigon at the Liverpool Empire, May Morris: Crafting a Legacy at the Lady Lever Art Gallery
The ‘reborn’ UK tour of Miss Saigon opened at the Empire in Liverpool this week (it’s on until Saturday and will also be in Blackpool and Manchester later this year). I’ve been half avoiding seeing Miss Saigon as an adult because this, of all musicals, is the one that made me really fall in love with theatre.
I went to see it in the West End when I was about 14 thanks to a friend’s generous parents who took me on a school-arranged trip as their guest. I wouldn’t have been able to go otherwise. I was just the right age for the romance to hit me right in the stomach, but it was the staging that I could barely believe - a real helicopter! I was so cringeworthily obsessed that I did a presentation on it for an English Speaking Exam and made a clock in Design Technology lessons with the logo painted on it. Oh, and I had the double cassette of the soundtrack.
High stakes then - to watch it again more than 30 years later. Would I still love it? Yes I did, very much so. And yet, the themes and songs that hit home the hardest this time around were different to when I was 14. Instead of being caught up in the love story between Kim and Chris, I was drawn more to the character arc of Chris’ best friend John (played by Dominic Hartley-Harris), who is fully “angry young man” in the first half, violence simmering underneath leery hedonism in the Saigon brothel. Three years later, he is fighting for the “Bui Doi” (Dust of Life) children fathered by GIs, poorly treated because of their dual heritage. It left me thinking about how war leaves people on all sides broken, destroyed, unable to fully recover if they even make it through alive.
Sorry for the Sunday afternoon downer - I promise there’s some beautiful art coming your way below. But I’ll just add - and all reviews will no doubt start with this so I’ve definitely buried the lead - that it’s worth booking a ticket for Seann Miley Moore’s electric performance as The Engineer alone. He is fantastic.
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‘I’m a remarkable woman - always was’
May Morris wasn’t one to mince her words when it came to design: “A colour that is in itself beautiful may become absolutely atrocious by awkward handling.”
Clashing shades were “natural enem[ies]”, she wrote, emotively - as if good interior design were a matter of life or death instead of a way of making your home nicer to live in. But to her, the daughter of the great Arts and Crafts textile designer William Morris who took over his embroidery workshop at the age of just 23. it was, at the very least, a matter of her whole life.
Her extraordinary eye for colour is one of the overwhelming impressions of the Lady Lever’s new exhibition May Morris: Crafting a Legacy. The other is how astonishingly brilliant she was at so many different things.
Fiona Slattery Clark, curator of Decorative Art at National Museums Liverpool, says: “At one time, she was very much overshadowed by her father but exhibitions, recent research and publications are all seeking to put that right and give her the prominent place that she deserves because she was one of the most pioneering women artists of the Arts and Crafts movement.”
Emphasising this theme, Honeysuckle, a wallpaper design long mistakenly attributed to William Morris, features prominently - as a framed woodblock print from c.1883 and papering some of the gallery walls.
Slattery Clark continues: “She was not just an artist - but also very much an influential voice because she set up the Women’s Guild of Arts in 1907, and sought to employ young women from less-privileged backgrounds.”
One of these was 14-year-old Ellen Wright, who she met during a visit to a school in Hammersmith,. Recognising her talent, she invited her to become an apprentice at the Morris & Co. embroidery workshop. Her sister Fanny later joined her - otherwise both would have likely ended up as domestic servants.
“Both these sisters remained with Morris & Co. for many years, and they went on to become teachers at Central School of Arts and Crafts in London.,” says Slattery Clark. “That opportunity opened up a whole new world to them, gave them a career path, they could only have dreamed of.”
Unlike her father, Morris had been taught to embroider (by her mother and aunt) so she could make what she designed. On display are designs alongside their finished pieces so you can follow her working method.
The exhibition also traces the link between Morris and the Lady Lever’s own collection - not the perhaps more obvious but male-centred Pre-Raphaelite link (the Brotherhood’s founding members were regular visits to her childhood home, she and her sister were friends Edward Burne-Jones’ children, and their mother was Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s muse and lover), but the influence of previous eras of design via a number of 17th-century English embroideries.
After her father’s death came Morris’ “most courageous, adventurous part of her career” as a freelance artist, designer and maker, says Slattery Clarke.
“No longer having to adhere to the Morris brand, she had complete freedom. She could make one-off pieces, and also turned her hand to jewellery-making, to metalwork.,” she says. “She was very well-published in her lifetime and was invited to tour the States, as part of a seven-month lecture program, delivering talks about historic jewellery, costume, the mask, pageantry.”
The challenge in putting together this exhibition was demonstrating all of Morris’ interests and accomplishments in what is quite a small space. Twenty-five core works were loaned by the William Morris Society, and there are also pieces from the V&A, National Museum Cardiff, Leicestershire Museums, the William Morris Gallery, Emery Walker Trust and a private collector.
As she once wrote to playwright George Bernard Shaw: “I’m a remarkable woman - always was, though none of you seemed to think so.”
May Morris: Crafting a Legacy is at the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, until Sunday, 1 November.
See your work featured in Stored Honey
If you’re an artist, actor, theatre maker, curator, director or producer, I’d love to hear more about your work. You can submit details of an exhibition, performance or cultural event by sending details and an image to laura@lauracdavis.com. If you would like to take part in Stored Honey’s regular Meet the Artist feature, please answer the questions in this Q&A or if you don’t like filling in forms I can send you the questions via email.
In case you missed it
Now booking
Award-winning actor Elaine Cassidy and Katherine Pearce will join the cast of Rory Mullarkey’s original play Even These Things, premiering at at the Royal Exchange in Manchester - 30 years after an IRA bomb devastated the heart of the city. Set across three moments in time - 1896, 1996 and 2026 - the play explores private and public histories, grief and love – and the making and re-making of the city.
The production will be completed by a community cast of 108 participants from across all 10 Greater Manchester boroughs, highlighting the profound impact that the events had on the Manchester community and placing the city’s people at the very centre of the story. Friday 15 May - Monday 15 June.
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I’m off now to enjoy this beautiful sunshine.
Have a great week,
Laura
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